


Born Under A Bad Sign

by bamboozledone



Series: Me And The Devil Blues [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alcoholism, Domestic Violence, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-24
Updated: 2012-11-24
Packaged: 2017-11-19 10:04:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/572099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bamboozledone/pseuds/bamboozledone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every story in Stiles’ life begins and ends in a hospital. Companion piece to 'It Serves Me Right to Suffer'.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Born Under A Bad Sign

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from the Etta James/Albert King song. 
> 
> There is hypothetically a third story in what I have lovingly dubbed the Blues 'verse. I'll keep you posted.

Every story in Stiles’ life begins and ends in a hospital.

 

Stiles didn’t cry when he was born. He wailed once when he came out of the womb, as the nurses held him up against the cold air of the emergency room, and that was that. But his heart rate dropped and his vitals were almost non-existent a half minute later, and Stiles spent the next four months on his life in an incubator, his mother’s hands pressed tight up against the glass as she watched her son struggle to breathe.

 

He left the hospital at five months, and slept soundly in the car seat while his mother popped in a Nina Simone cassette and his father hummed along, tired and content.

 

\---

 

It’s hard watching somebody die slowly, Stiles supposes. To watch somebody who you love lose a little bit of the life in her eyes every morning, see their energy torn from her body with every move they make. Stiles supposes that it’s just as difficult for the person who does the dying, but for the one watching it, it must be agony. To live in that kind of helplessness can be just as awful as knowing that your clock is slowly ticking away, racing toward the finish line with abandon.  

 

Stiles doesn’t really know what it’s like to watch somebody die slowly. Because Stiles’ mom didn’t die slowly. No matter what the hallucination of his father said at Lydia’s poolside, she didn’t die slowly. Not at all.  

 

They were sitting at the dinner table, his mother or father discussing the PTSA meeting they went to the night before, and Stiles was pushing the remainder of his tuna casserole around his plate when his mother’s face went blank and her body went slack.

 

He remembers watching his father ease his mother’s body to the floor, remembers watching him press his cheek up to her breast, looking for a heartbeat. He remembers the 911 call, and the way his father screamed when the ambulance arrived, the sirens echoing in the cold night air.

 

An aneurysm, they explain to Stiles later. Looking back, it will seem pretty irresponsible to tell a kid such a complicated, gruesome medical diagnosis, because Stiles will spend the next few weeks scouring the internet for every piece of information he can find on the thing that ripped his mother away from him 

 

When the surgeons were done, his mother was a bloody mess on a cold metal table. Stiles wasn’t supposed to see it, but they didn’t close the door quickly enough, and the image still keeps him up in the middle of restless nights.

 

Stiles didn’t cry, afterward. He went home and ripped his bedroom apart, piece by piece, until his fingers were bloody and his mouth raw from screaming.

 

\---

 

It happens on what would have been his mother’s forty-fifth birthday. Stiles is in his room, messing around with something on his laptop when he hears a loud _thump_ from the living room, blunt weight against carpeted wooden floors. At first he doesn’t think anything of it: His father is nothing if heavy-footed, and Stiles is used to hearing odd bumps in the middle of the night when his dad finally makes his way home.

 

What finally gets Stiles up out of his desk chair is the absolute silence that follows the sound. It permeates through his room until Stiles feels it whine in his bones. When he runs to the bottom of the staircase, his father is on the floor, and Stiles flashes back to the moment when his mother’s head slumped against the kitchen table.

 

He calls 911 because he’s running on pure instinct, and then drives his father to the hospital himself even though he’s three years away from a driver’s license. He runs four red lights and a stop sign before he pulls up in front of the emergency room and throws the parking brake.

 

“Please,” he says when the doctors tear down the hall with his dad, and Melissa McCall holds him tight against her chest and Stiles lets himself cry into the light blue fabric of her scrubs until he slumps into a chair, defeated and alone as the doctors give him periodic updates.

 

\---

 

Stiles buys a cheap little guitar from a flea market in Pomona. The vendor doesn’t speak much English, and Stiles is inept at best in his Spanish studies, but he shells out fifteen dollars for curved blue wood and nylon strings and a flimsy cloth cover. He’s awful at playing it, and Scott starts throwing pillows at him when he plays _Wonderwall_ for the millionth time.

 

“Clearly music is not your thing, man,” Scott says while Stiles fumbles with a metronome. “Let it go.”

 

\---

 

Stiles’ parents were not a happy couple. They spent most nights screaming at one another once they put Stiles to bed, like their son couldn’t possibly hear every shout and curse through the thin walls of his room. On one scary occasion, the neighbors called the sheriff’s department, and a couple uniforms came to the Stilinski house with their guns out of their holsters. One of them, a woman with a soft smile and pretty brown eyes, took Stiles outside while the officers physically restrained his father, his mother weeping softly in a corner.

 

His father never hit his mother, never even came close to it, but sometimes Stiles thinks the things his father did to his mother were a lot worse than physical violence.

 

\---

 

“Just because we don’t love each other anymore doesn’t me we don’t love you.”

 

It’s the same speech every child is given when his parents split up. Stiles was eleven, and it was his mother who gave him the platitude while his father was off drinking himself into another stupor on a Friday evening. She sat him down on the couch, muted his cartoons, and told him that while she and his father had once been deeply in love, they were different people now and had different priorities. His mother put the family first and his father just didn’t anymore, and, because of this, they had decided that it would be best if they were no longer together.

 

Stiles didn’t understand much that she said after, only that he and his mother would be moving away, maybe to Los Angeles proper, to start over again. She promises Stiles that he will make lots of new friends at his new school, and that they can visit Scott whenever he wants. Stiles remembers not loving the idea, but he saw how sad his mother had been the last few months, seen the circles under her eyes turn into war-weary bags, so he smiled and told her that he was excited to live so close to Disneyland.

 

She died a week later, facedown.

 

\---

 

Stiles’ father never wanted to be sheriff. He was fine being a deputy, smoking and drinking with a band of forty-somethings with wives and kids back home after eight hour shifts of pulling over teenagers for speeding or pot. He made enough money to scrape by on the mortgage and the car payments and his mother’s pay as a public accountant more than made up the difference between the bills and their joint bank account. It was a system and it worked.

 

When his mother dies, Stiles’ father designs the candidacy signs himself. They are bright green and blue and Mr. Stilinski becomes Sheriff Stilinski six months later.  

 

\---

 

Stiles made a choice, a year after Laura died. He may have made it the day he picked up Derek from the hospital, after the Camaro was totaled and Derek came out with a split and a black eye that took a week to heal.

 

When he walks into Derek’s apartment, he expects nothing and gets everything when he hears the strains of Patsy Cline floating across the room.

 

\---

 

Stiles feels like he knows her. Laura. Derek speaks about her like she was some sort of goddess, worthy of veneration and tribute. He goes on for hours and hours sometimes about the sort of music she liked, the people she dated, the way she could just smile and men and women would turn their heads to stare at her.

 

“Can you miss somebody you’ve never met?” Stiles asks when he looks at the picture of Derek and Laura, young and illuminated by candlelight during a birthday party.

 

“No,” Derek says quietly. He flicks off the kitchen light and leans against the counter. “But you can try.”

 

Stiles dreams that night of a wedding in his father’s backyard, where his mother and Laura sit in a corner and laugh as the glow from the string of white lights sparkles around them.

 

\---

 

Stiles likes watching Derek play.

 

They sit sometimes for hours and hours in the middle of the forest, Stiles watching as Derek’s hands glide across the body of the guitar. Sometimes Derek sings, barely a whisper above the sound of the wind through the pine trees. It’s a pleasant tone, deep and resonant, and Stiles wonders whether Derek sang or played guitar first.  

 

Sometimes he lies on his bed, thinks about what Derek’s hands would feel like on him, stoking him the same way he handles the guitar. Then he remembers that the things he loves have a habit of leaving him, finding solace six feet under or at the wrong end of a thousand hangovers, and he takes a sleeping pill and nods off into a dreamless slumber.   

 

\---

 

One day, Derek takes Stiles to a pawn shop at the end of Main Street.

 

The old man who owns the shop has a knowing sort of look on his face when Derek walks in and hands him the pawn ticket. The man doesn’t even take a look at the ticket number, just pulls a hard guitar case out from the back room and hands it to Derek without another word. He pushes away the money Derek tries to place on the counter, and Derek thanks him, and leaves Stiles, bewildered, in the store.

 

The guitar is nothing extraordinary to behold, just metal strings across wood, but Stiles thinks he gets why Derek’s eyes glisten, moist, when they get in the Jeep.

 

\---

 

Stiles does not have the capacity to hate. As much as he wants to hate things, _people_ , he can’t do it. There’s something about the feeling of even strong dislike that makes him sick to his stomach, so he tries hard not to ruminate on things that inspire those types of emotions, instead focusing on empty laughs and superficial romance in lieu of the dark thoughts that shimmer in and out of focus.

 

Two years after Kate dies, Derek loses it. There’s a whole slough of calls between Scott and Derek’s betas as they spend days trying to track him as Derek moves from place to place in the reserve, never staying the night in a single location and leaving a charred mess in his wake.

 

It takes two weeks before they find Derek, covered in dirt and blood in his apartment. A few records are smashed on the ground, and a bloody knife sits in the center of the kitchen counter. Stiles pretends not to notice that most of the wounds that mar his skin go deeper than an inch as he washes Derek off with warm water and a terrycloth towel.

 

If Stiles could hate somebody, he would hate Kate Argent.

 

\---

 

The first time they kiss, Stiles is seventeen and clumsy and hopelessly, hopelessly infatuated with a concept that he barely understands. Derek is calm and patient because he has to be.

 

The first time they fuck, Stiles is still seventeen, the clumsiness gone, but the infatuation remains, bright and unyielding. Derek forsakes the patience that he clung so desperately to before.

 

\---

 

Sex changes things. Some things, at least. Maybe it should change more, but it doesn’t.

 

It doesn’t stop Derek from throwing him against crumbling walls or from looking so emotionally constipated that Stiles wants to smack him. It certainly doesn’t mean that Derek becomes any less hostile toward him in public or that there’s hand-holding and soft kissing in the hallway outside Stiles’ room. Hell, it doesn’t even stop Derek from threatening to kill him on a weekly basis. But things change around them, slowly, evolving.

 

Derek lights up something that smells like weed, but isn’t. Stiles wrinkles his nose and turns on the fan that he made Derek buy last week when they were doing a late night drug store run.

 

“You are a walking cliché,” Stiles adds, pulling on his sweats. He winces as he fingers at a welt on his arm, and he makes a mental note to bring some sort of triple antibiotic next time. “Also, secondhand smoke kills, and my father can smell a cigarette a mile and a half away, so put it out.”  

 

Derek takes a puff in response, blows the hot smoke into Stiles’ mouth as he kisses him and wrenches his human fingers down his back.

 

\---

 

It’s a fight they keep having because Stiles doesn’t know how to let things go.

 

The Hunter aims the crossbow, but Stiles can see from here that she’s young and inexperienced, so he dodges the arrow without much effort. He does land on his hand, though, and there’s a faint crack that’s going to mean another shady visit to the McCall house for whatever brand of painkillers Melissa can slip him without the hospital noticing.

 

“Stiles,” Derek hisses as another Hunter, older and more vicious, points a gun toward him. “Move!”

 

Derek hits him, _hard_ , his hand striking right along Stiles’ mouth. The sound of skin on skin rings in the concrete halls of the abandoned warehouse. For a moment, Stiles just sits there, his eyes laughably wide, and his good hand clutching his jaw in disbelief.

 

“Fuck,” he says later, still wiping the blood from his mouth when they get into the Jeep. “Fuck, Derek, you’re more of a menace than the Argents.”

 

“You want to die? Is that what this is about?” Derek’s hands are on his shoulders, and Stiles cringes when he feels Derek’s claws piece the fabric of his flannel shirt.

 

Stiles glares, spitting blood from his mouth and watching it catch in the fabric of the seats. “God, do you even like me?”

 

“Stiles…”

 

“Just get out,” Stiles whispers. He doesn’t lift his head when he hears Derek growl and slam the door.

 

\---

 

There are moments, sometimes brief and more often long and lingering, when Stiles thinks about how much better his life would be if Allison Argent hadn’t wheedled her way into every small aspect of Scott McCall’s existence. Scott was once the glue that held Stiles together, but he doesn’t seem to want that position anymore, and Stiles knows, just knows, that Allison is the culprit.  

 

It’s unfair, perhaps. Allison is not the one who sunk her teeth into Scott, not the one who turned his life upside down in so many ways on what probably constituted a whim. But she took advantage of a situation and Stiles can’t quite forgive her for it.    

 

It’s in the fifty one texts Stiles sends Scott over the length of a week and the ten or twelve that Stiles receives in return. It’s in the way that Stiles gets a smile when Scott sits next to him in history, but the full-bodied joy Scott expresses when he sees Allison so much as turning a corner in the hall.  Stiles wonders whether, if it came down to it, Scott would put down his life for Allison, someone who has known him for a scant two years, before he would put his life down for Stiles, who has been the voice at the other end of the telephone line for an era before that.

 

There are moments, parts of moments, when he wonders if he would trade what happened to Scott for what is currently happening with Derek. If somehow Scott hadn’t gotten the bite, and Allison had passed him by without so much as a glance up from her cell phone, would things be better, would Stiles be happier? A thousand hypotheticals are all well and good, but they don’t help Stiles sleep at night, even with Derek’s chest pressed against his and his fingers carded through Derek’s hair.

 

Stiles does not hate Allison, but he does resent her.  

 

\---

 

A week goes by. Derek takes to standing outside the Stilinski house, just peering through the front windows while Stiles putters around inside. Occasionally the Sheriff sees him, shoos him off the property with one of his three unlicensed handgun and a threat to call for backup and subsequently gives Stiles a lecture about flaunting his incredibly inappropriate relationship on their front porch.  

 

Stiles finally opens the front door on the eighth day. “Domestic violence is not cute,” he starts. His shoes squeak against the wet wood of the porch, and he shivers in the misty air of the night while Derek’s eyes flash a low warning red. “And trust me when I say that crime rate in this town is just low enough that the Sheriff would not hesitate to take a moment out of his day to mow your ass down with the sawed-off shotgun he keeps under the bed.”

 

“You know I didn’t do it on purpose.”

 

Stiles laughs, bitterness cutting through his breath. “Yeah, that’s what they all say. Do I have to give you the Circle of Violence talk? Did you get that lesson when you were in high school or did it only recently become mandatory curriculum?”

 

“I would never hurt you intentionally, Stiles.”

 

It’s the beginning of a long conversation that they’ll probably never finish. It’s circular, like a vinyl record that loops the same seven words over and over again until the listener feels like he’s going mad from the repetition. Derek apologizes, Stiles resents, and then Derek resents and Stiles apologizes. But they’ll be okay. They’ll get through this. That is how they survive.

 

\---

 

Stiles remembers the first time his father offered him a drink:

 

His fifteenth birthday had come and gone, his father working the long hours that go hand in hand with taking charge of a department that floundered for nearly a decade. It was more than a week before Stiles saw anything in the way of an acknowledgement that Stiles was one year older and, hypothetically, one year wiser. When he did finally see something, it was a new lacrosse stick, laying in the middle of the kitchen table with a little green bow affixed to the middle.

 

“Dad, thanks!” he said as he jogged into the living room, his hand wrapped around the stick. “How did you know what…”

 

He trailed off when he saw his dad slumped back on the couch, still wearing his uniform from the previous night’s rounds. He had a glass in his hand, a bottle nestled next to his side, mostly empty. There was another glass, smaller and cracked near the base, sitting in the center of the coffee table.

 

His father pushed the glass of the amber liquid toward Stiles as he drew closer.

 

“Drink it,” his father had said. It was a command, never a question anymore.

 

The bourbon burned his throat, and Stiles coughed violently until the entire glass was gone. The liquor ruminated in his stomach while he watched the father’s eyes shift with the light of the cars passing by the house. Stiles spent most of the night with his head over the toilet while his father slept off his glasses in front of a blank television, a B.B. King record humming in the background.   

 

\---

 

Robert Johnson is a favorite topic of conversation when they’re alone, shrouded in darkness with the smell of sex and the cheap stick incense Stiles buys from the hippie down the road. Robert Johnson is Derek’s favorite musician and Stiles remembers being young and listening to _Night on the Delta_ on the record player while his mom and dad danced, long before the Sheriff started living inside a bottle.

 

Stiles flops onto the bed next to Derek, his hands folded behind his head as his breathing modulates. “Do you think it’s true? What the legends say about him?”

 

Derek snorts as he pulls on his shirt, takes a sip from the water bottle on the side of the table. “You believe in Hell Hounds now?”

 

Stiles winces when Derek accidentally elbows him in the chest. Someday, he’s going to get Derek to invest in a bed that’s wider than a gurney. “Dude, are you serious?”

 

“It wasn’t Hell Hounds.”

 

Stiles huffs against Derek’s neck as he turns over. “Well, if it wasn’t Hell Hounds, what was it?”

 

“An Omega,” Derek says simply, wiping a streak of sweat off Stiles’ face. His hand twitches as he draws a finger across Stiles’ neck. “Obviously.”

 

\---

 

Derek gets a steady gig, playing backup for some of smaller bands at a club whenever they need an extra set of hands. Even though Derek starts playing religiously on Friday and Saturday nights, Stiles doesn’t go a lot because he can’t stomach how the women and men look at Derek, like he’s some sort of wet dream fantasy with a guitar strapped to his shoulder. The more cavalier ones brush up against him when he gets off the stage, and Stiles has to hold himself back, clutching at his non-alcoholic drink until his hand aches. It’s the same jealousy he feels when he sees Allison and Scott sitting in a corner booth, but deeper, darker.

 

\---

 

“Laura would have liked you.”

 

It’s a statement from the middle of nowhere when Stiles is pulling a flimsy white pick from his pocket and settling back on the couch with a ukulele Derek bought him for his birthday. He’s still pretty awful at it, and he knows that Derek will eventually claw his hands off if he plays _Somewhere over the Rainbow_ or _I’m Yours_ again, but the rhythmic strumming makes his brain slow down, a non-medical alternative to the Adderall he’s been abusing for the last three years.

 

“Well why shouldn’t she?” Stiles gives into the urge and goes all out on the Hawaiian-lilted Judy Garland classic. “I have a magnetic personality and a smile that just won’t stop.”

 

“She would have wanted to turn you.”

 

It’s a conversation they have once and awhile, usually in the middle of the night when Derek is slipping into unconsciousness and Stiles is awake and staring at a wall. “Do you?” Stiles stretches back against the lumpy pillows. He puts the ukulele at his feet, the pick forgotten somewhere in the cushions. “Want to?”

 

Derek shrugs, like it’s not the only question that keeps them awake in the middle of the night. “Sometimes.” He pauses, and looks around the kitchen. “Depends.”

 

“On?”

 

“You.”

 

\---

 

Derek comes over one night, just him a couple records on vinyl that Stiles had promised to burn to CDs a week ago. It’s an unexpected visit, an anomaly for their relationship, so he slips in the back door and toward the staircase as quietly as he can.

 

Derek finds Stiles standing outside his father’s room, watching as the Sheriff slumbers under the weight of heavy blankets. The hallway reeks of booze and vomit and industrial strength carpet cleaner. Stiles knows that his clothes are still soaked in vodka from a stray glass his father spilled on the table.

 

He feels a hand cup the back of his neck, and Derek’s body shifts behind him, warm and strong.

 

“How come you never told me?”

 

It’s funny to Stiles, somehow. Derek is the one whose soul was conceived of in fire and blood, but Stiles is the one who remains so scarred and unwilling to move forward.

 

Stiles will tell him, some day: The first time he drank with his father, the night his mother died. He’ll tell him everything.

 

\---

 

Stiles cuts class and brings Derek lunch at work in a brown paper sack. It’s strange, because he’ll never get used to seeing Derek in anything outside of jeans and his leather jacket, and the stark contrast of Derek’s skin against the white button-down shirt and the grey tie makes Stiles’ mouth dry and his heart rate increases, a stutter-step that he knows Derek can hear.

 

“Problem?” Derek asks as he picks through the bag, pulling out a poor excuse for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a Ziploc bag filled with Goldfish crackers.

 

Stiles smirks as Derek starts scarfing down the sandwich. “I like it. My boyfriend is a professional.”

 

Derek looks up, laughing when Stiles flushes a sweet-hot red. It’s the first time Stiles has used that kind of word. It’s also the first time Stiles has claimed any form of possession, claimed that Derek is his, and it hits him like the first breath of water into the lungs of a drowning man.

 

\---

 

They force their way into a routine. Derek goes to work, Stiles goes to school, and they spend nights in front of the television set, Stiles grumbling his way through AP Calc and Derek bemoaning the state of sitcoms on network television. On the weekends, when Derek’s neighbors are out, he pulls out the guitar, and they sing through blues standards  

 

Derek’s existence is barely cutting corners, and there are bills littering the countertops and sofa cushions that Stiles knows Derek can barely afford to pay the minimum on, but it feels like winning every single day that he comes to Derek’s place and sees him sitting in front of a mug of coffee, his eyes unfocused and glazed.

 

Sometimes Stiles makes jokes about how he’s the housewife and Derek grumbles something about housewives being response for making dinner for their husbands, but it always makes for a short-lived joke. 

 

\---

 

“My dad tried to kill himself,” Stiles blurts out one night, as they sit in the Jeep on a stakeout outside of the hospital. Stiles turns up the volume when Derek looks at him. “When I was twelve, he tried to kill himself with a bottle of pills.”

 

They don’t speak for the rest of the night, and the witches they’ve been on the lookout for don’t make an appearance, but Stiles doesn’t think the stakeout was a total bust.

 

\---

 

Stiles comes into Derek’s apartment on his last day of high school, and throws his nearly empty backpack by the front door. Derek is at the table, a blue pen gripped between his teeth as he flips back and forth between a set of sheets he has attached to a clipboard. Stiles sees the Kaiser logo printed on the top of the first one, and Stiles’ own name (to his utter dismay, his given name) written near the bottom of the sheet.   

 

“Since when did I become your ‘in case of emergency’ guy?”

 

Derek looks up from the blue forms. Stiles can see that about half of the pages are scribbled on, many lines crossed out once or twice in Derek’s messy scribble. “Do you not want to be?”

 

Stiles pushes back against the lumpy chair cushion when he sits down. “I didn’t know.” He scratches absently at his face. “I’m flattered, I guess?”

 

Derek snorts, flips to the back page and signs the “Don’t be. You’re the only person I’ve got.”

 

“That’s not exactly romantic.”

 

“No,” Derek murmurs absently as he flips the top sheet over and frowns. “What’s your cell number again?”  

 

Stiles flips on the television as he rattles off the ten digits. There’s a documentary about Muddy Waters on PBS, and Stiles turns up the volume until the faint scratches of Derek’s pen are lost under the strains of _Got My Mojo Runnin_ ’. Derek mutters something every so often when he has to scratch out another answer, or when he flips through the corresponding handbook, a little confusing flitting across his face as he reads about out-of-network coverage.

 

“Do you want take out?’ Stiles asks awhile later, after Derek’s clearly given up on the medical insurance fight for the evening.

 

“Yeah,” Derek says, flipping the television off and picking up the landline. “Chinese or Thai?”

 

It’s not a hospital and this isn’t romance, not really. But it is a home.


End file.
